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Because Pathfinder and 3.5 are more fun than work.
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Friday, April 17, 2015

Kasatha

Let’s get this out of the way first: kasathas are not
Golarion’s thri-kreen.I will hear none
of that talk.Yes, four arms.Yes, difficult for outsiders to gender. Yes,
hunters in a desert environment.But
that’s it.Thri-kreen are insects from
Dark Sun; kasathas are humanoids from a planet with a red sun.(…Which, ironically, makes these aliens less
alien in many ways than the thri-kreen bugs.Go figure.)

More thoughts: kasathas first appeared as an experiment in
the Advanced Race Guide.But it was clear that they were more than an
afterthought, and sure enough they wound up in Bestiary 4 and then got a starring role in the Iron Gods Adventure
Path and related supplements like People
of the Stars.Bestiary 4 also adds some nice notes like that fact that they have
a matriarchal society and are working to get back to their home world.

In your campaign, how they act and how PCs react to them is
probably related to how common or uncommon they are, and whether they know
where their home world is.A kasatha who
believes he is the last of his race will likely behave very differently from a
teenage kasatha on walkabout for his gap year.

If you want to play a kasatha player character, PotS has more details and unique traits,
feats, etc., including their spinal swords and a really badass
double-bow-wielding ranger archetype.(I
also love that Sphinx is a possible starting language for kasatha PCs…a
possible cultural tie that I don't explore below but am fascinated by.Sphinx astronomers, anyone?Maybe even sphinx mission commanders!)

And yes, if you want to do a Pathfinder version of Dark Sun,
and you want it to have thri-kreen, then you can use kasathas for a quick-and-dirty version.But you better add some funky insect traits
and maybe bump up their size pronto.Because they're not the same.Grrr.

The secretive
witchwyrdsdidn’t just come down from the heavens for trade.They hunt their escaped slave race, the
kasathas.While their desire to mask
their presence by blending in with the locals has slowed their search, they
nevertheless have agents in every desert market.These agents will pay handsomely for news of
elusive four-armed desert hunters.Meanwhile, an adventuring party bearing goods with witchwyrd marks may
find themselves treated as enemies by any kasathas they come across.

A four-armed
gladiator is the only one of his kind…or so he believes.His singular existence and prowess in the
arena have given him a bit of a god complex, and he rules over the other
gladiators—including captured adventurers—with four iron fists.His world is upended the night the stars
align and the entire coliseum becomes a sort of space bridge—and a kasatha war
party materializes inside the arena.

Kasathas are a
commons sight on desert worlds and rougher spaceports. But when a
white-cloaked explorer claims to have found the kasatha home world, the race is
galvanized into a mass exodus.Adventurers
coerced into helping the stranger will soon come to suspect his “discovery “is
really just a strong hunch…but also an accurate one.Too bad brain collectors, denizens of Leng,
and worse dominate the home world now.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4
174

Hi guys!Ever since I
came back after my broken computer fiasco I feel like I’ve been posting to you rather than interacting with you.A lot of that is just a) my crazy work
schedule, b) continued sick loved one/hospital stuff, c) more gym time, and d)
SPRING!!!—but I will try to be a little better about the back-and-forth if I
can.

And please keep sharing and reblogging as the impulse
strikes you!This second go-round the
monsters much less familiar to a non-Pathfinder audience, so your enthusiasm
remains the very best way to help this blog grow.

By the way, please forgive the occasional typos. I am aware of them, but disagreements between MS Word and the Blogger template make my entries nearly impossible to edit once posted. I blame gremlins. You can find a more polished version of this blog over on Tumblr.